How to send a mail on a click?

Question

I just want to send a mail automatically on clicking an icon. I want to Attach Ping and Trace Report automatically with time stamp to some of the Email Address with some text in the message body. Is it possible ? I am using thunderbird as my email client with ubuntu 10.10.

Answer 1

You could set up the console mailer "postfix".

sudo apt-get install postfix mailutils libsasl2-modules

Depending on what you need and what mail provider you're using, you'll have to do some configuration. The process is described here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PostfixBasicSetupHowto#Install%20Postfix . If you happen to speak German there is a more user friendly article: http://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/postfix

Then create a shell script from the template:

#!/bin/bash
pingreturn=$(ping -c 1 google.com)
echo "text in email: $pingreturn" | mail -s "Some Subject" a.b@c.de

This will send the mail "text in email: " followed by the return of the ping command to the address "a.b@c.de" with the sucject "Some subject".

With a launcher for that script you got your one-click mail. Shoudn't be terribly hard. Might be overkill though.

Answer 2

We do this by using a script and mutt (sudo apt-get install mutt) as command line mail client. It is one of few command line mail clients that can use attachments. Plus afaik it does not need any setting up: it uses the currently active mail setup.

As an example you could make a script with a ping and a mail with an attachment and a mailbody(with the same information) like this:

ping www.google.nl -c 4 > {attachment}
ping www.google.nl -c 4 > {/dir/to/mailbody}
mutt {mailadress} -s {subject} -a {attachment} -c {cc} -b {bcc} < {/dir/to/mailbody}

And the launcher, icon or a link or what ever you want this to activate it just needs to launch the script.